Sir Xsarus wrote:
You're asserting that Obama is using a wait and see approach with terrorist organizations? Do you mean wait and see how many of them are killed by drones?
Drone strikes are largely ineffective at doing anything at all, except allowing the president to claim he's doing something. Which appears to have worked (for some people). It's the same sort of policy Clinton engaged in, where he'd drop some bombs somewhere now and then to make it appear as though he was being tough, meanwhile the problems just got worse.
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The US has hardly been inactive the last 8 years.
Obama's foreign policy approach has been nearly non-present. Being "active" isn't the same as being "effective". And he's been very very ineffective. More to the point, he has a clear pattern of adopting a "wait and see" approach, which inevitably results in negative results. He's so afraid of making a mistake, or being seen as meddling, that he's failing to take any action at all, resulting in others making all the decisions and gaining power and influence. And those "others" are not other Western powers, but various extremist groups seeking power in the region.
When a popular call for change happened in Eqypt, Obama hesitated. As a result, we sat at the kids table while the Muslim Brotherhood came to power there. Honestly, we lucked out with that one (almost certainly with an assist from the CIA), in that the military basically reasserted control and removed the Brotherhood from power. Had Obama acted, we might have been able to influence the outcome so as to have a moderate non-military leader friendly to the US gain power instead.
When a rebellion broke out in Libya, again Obama hesitated. Once again, he appeared primarily motivated by the need to not appear to be influencing world events (which makes you wonder what the **** he thinks foreign policy is supposed to be about), and a fear of "arming the bad guys". As a result, the revolution nearly failed, only succeeding when he finally decided to help out. Of course, by then the leaders of the rebellion were already firmly entrenched, giving us little to no say over who came to power (and effectively ensuring that the "bad guys" were now armed), and what influences other groups might have. Combine that with a desire to not appear as though anything was wrong, he failed to acknowledge (even internally) that Libya was chock full of powers that didn't like us or want us there. Shockingly, when we later attempted (one can assume) to exert some influence in the country, our ambassador was killed (the whole Benghazi attacks that everyone on the Left loves to downplay). Total disaster. Totally avoidable.
When a rebellion broke out in Syria, once again Obama hesitated. Same motivation at work. Same failed approach. Only this time, he's still hesitating. Still allowing a conflict to continue unabated. And since we didn't get in on the ground floor and arm folks who later might just be friendly and appreciative, the rebels who rose to the top were those armed via the black market, getting funding from splinter arms of Al Queda, various wealthy dissident Arabs pushing a Caliphate deam, and other "bad guys". Surprise! So now we have heavily armed folks spilling out from that conflict into Iraq and taking territory.
And as a side combo to that, he was so desperate to "not be Bush" that instead of actually gradually drawing down forces in Iraq based on conditions on the ground (which would require being held to account if things failed after we left), he chickened out of the whole process by just failing to renegotiate a status of forces agreement with Iraq, effectively requiring us to exit without having to go though the political annoyance of actually showing that we'd finished what we started there. So, as a result, we left an Iraq that still was not quite able to hold its own, right at the same time that those pesky rebels in Syria, we'd allowed to be armed by random bad guys who hate us, were looking for more territory to take.
Hell, you can't make up a story of a series of f-ups worse than this. If Tom Clancy (king of the "crazy what if" scenarios) had pitched this to his editor he'd have been laughed out of the room and told to come up with something a bit more realistic. Maybe fringe Japanese businessmen still **** off about WW2 seeking revenge on the US and engaging in a super convoluted combination of hacking the stock exchange, disabling the Pacific Fleet during training exercises, and building nuclear weapons under the guise of communications satellite launches to accomplish it all, maybe? That's so much more probable.
Obama has become the Hesitator in Chief. There's a point where you move from taking time to make a good decision and into "making things worse by your indecision", and he's well past that point now. He seems to be deliberately choosing to make the US as irrelevant on the world stage as possible. And while that may sit well with the "US is bad!!!" crowd, it's absolutely at odds with the job he's been elected to perform. No matter how much you may not like the US meddling in world affairs, his policy of "hope things work out ok" is far far worse. We're seeing it get worse right in front of our eyes.
He's the biggest foreign policy failure we've ever had as president. By a long shot. To be fair, Carter only got one term to **** things up, so there's that. Obama has more or less lurched from one foreign policy disaster to the next though. It would be laughable if the cost weren't things like civilians being beheaded on Youtube.
Edited, Sep 15th 2014 4:53pm by gbaji